Painting the Landscape with Fire

"Painting the Landscape with Fire" is a blog about a fire-maintained ecosystem, the great longleaf pine habitat which once dominated the landscape of the Southeastern US. This blog is an intro to an upcoming book. Excerpts from chapters and photos illustrate some of the topics.

Saturday, June 16, 2007

After a burn and a shot of rain, things green up. Bracken fern, an early successional plant, grows in a maturing forest of longleaf pine.

Excerpt from "A Matter of Aesthetics"

January 29, and South Carolina was in the first cold snap of the winter. At seven a.m. it was six degrees below freezing and windy when I stepped out of the house for a long drive to meet Judy Barnes, DNR wildlife biologist; Barclay McFadden, owner of Scotswood, a longleaf pine plantation; and plantation manager Craig McFadden . . .

Barclay McFadden loved to hunt quail, and quail need an early successional habitat. But Barclay also loved mature longleaf forests, and his intent was to reestablish one.

Fortunately, these were not rival affections. Frequent prescribed burning is one way to achieve an early successional habitat on the ground within a maturing forest. The seeming paradox of old-growth trees towering above an early successional habitat reminded me of the forest in Gary Snyder’s poem “Toward Climax”:

A virgin Forest Is ancient; many- Breasted . . .

“I love to hunt, love the experience of being out with bird dogs and riding horseback,” said Barclay. “I don’t even need to shoot. I just like watching the dogs, watching my friends and family. More than that, it’s a matter of aesthetics, of finding a piece of property that’s been damaged and returning it to what it was to begin with--in this case, a longleaf/broomsedge savanna. You’ve seen pictures of those old savannas. We don’t have any of those original forests left in South Carolina, but look at a longleaf savanna that’s 70 or 80 years old--in my mind, there’s nothing prettier than that."

The fate of our Southern longleaf pine forests ultimately depends upon managing burns in the wildland-urban interface, the WUI

Excerpt from "WUI, pronounced Woo--eee"

March 15, eight p.m., and I was back home with a killer sinus headache. Gray, blue, and yellow smoke swirled inside my sinuses. I wondered if the men I had been with on the day’s burn had similar ailments. But I wasn’t complaining. It had been a good fire. I was still excited.

The night before, Pat Ferral of Ferral Environmental Services had called unexpectedly. Short notice, he said, but he was going to attempt the prescribed burn of a 36-acre tract in the Hitchcock Woods of Aiken, South Carolina, and he invited me along. At first, I was reluctant. I had already been on several burns. I pretty much knew the routine . . .

But this, really, was the chance I had been waiting for. The question--to burn or not to burn--and the future of fire, at least in Southeastern forest systems, did not depend upon the prescribed burns of remote, rural tracts where the only complaint might be smoke blowing across a little-traveled county road. The fate of fire, and ultimately the fate of longleaf pine forests and upland oak woodlands, as well, depended upon managing burns in the wildland-urban interface, the WUI.

Aiken is home to one of the oldest, biggest, and richest equestrian communities in America. Although Pat was only burning 36 acres, “this is a big one,” he said. “We got a very heavy fuel load. It hasn’t been burned in fifteen years and it’s right up against property lines . . . There’s a lot of liability, there’s gonna be a lot of smoke, and we have to take special precautions” . . .

Pat was happy but intense. Burning pumped him up, and this burn, especially. It’s an understatement to say a lot was riding on it--not just his good name and livelihood, but a forest of mature longleaf, a row of million dollar homes, and thoroughbreds as pricey as BMWs . . .

“I don’t know if there is an ideal habitat,” said Mark Hatfield, wildlife biologist with the National Wild Turkey Federation. “In the past, people believed that turkeys needed large, mature, old-growth forests because that’s where turkeys were found, and people assumed there was a correlation. But those forests were just areas that had not been clearcut. Turkeys are very adaptable to hardwood ridges, bottoms, and upland sites. Overgrown fields are ideal for nesting. Turkeys need a variety of habitats--for example, early successional habitat, including warm season grasses. They also need mature forests and the transition areas between the two” . . .

If there’s one habitat that wild turkeys can’t live without, however, it’s an open understory. Although the birds can fly up to 35 miles per hour, their primary mode of escape is running. “Their avoidance of predators is based on sight and hearing,” said Mark. “When there’s a dense understory and they can’t see or hear well, they will avoid those areas.”

The most natural, cost-effective, and efficient tool for achieving an open understory is fire. Opening the understory not only gives turkeys clear lines of sight and escape, it encourages new plant and insect growth--bugs with sprouts--for browsing. “Remove the midstory of sweetgums, kill their root system with herbicides or fire, especially during the spring, and remove the leaf litter cover,” said Mark. “That will spawn new growth of native plants” . . .

“Fire is a disturbance that’s needed in nature. I get calls from people who say, ‘Hey, I just bought a hundred acres. I’m not gonna do anything to it but give it to wildlife.’ But Mother Nature’s dynamic. Change is never-ending. Fire brings new growth. You have a greater diversity of plants and, therefore, a greater diversity of insects, which the poults need for the high protein content” . . .

5:30 p.m., September 29, and I was standing outside the Carolina Sandhills’ NWR office next to wildlife biologist Laura Housh, forester Clay Ware and 8 others, including Neal Humke and Brian Watts of The Nature Conservancy, who had driven down from Piney Grove Plantation in Virginia for the occasion--an attempt to translocate 6 red-cockaded woodpeckers to their refuge . . .

At dusk, each RCW would bed down in its own cavity, cozily ignorant of the US Fish and Wildlife Red-Cockaded Recovery Act of 1985 which mandated translocation, chirpilly unaware that with nightfall it might be stalked, startled from its sleep, frightened from its nest, netted, bagged, boxed and shipped to become part of a different colony in a different state and thereby participate in a gambit for its species’ survival. The birds would be stressed. Laura was stressed, too, although I would not have known it if she had not hinted to me how much depended on this day . . .

As we approached, Laura was kneeling at the trunk of the cavity tree, holding the frightened bird. “The toes of one of its feet are snagged in the net,” she said. Neal held a flashlight in one hand and the data sheet in the other as Laura noted the colored bands on the free leg--“white, white, mauve.” She then asked Neal to grasp the bird so that she could free its other leg and read the number of the aluminum band. This was a dramatic moment. Not only might the bird escape as it changed hands, it was also the first time that Neal would hold one of the endangered birds . . .

Inside each box, the birds were pecking loudly now like miners trapped in black caves testing the walls with pickaxes for the best routes of escape, or like prisoners in solitary cells tapping messages in morse code to other inmates, planning their breakout--”Where are we now, how many were caught, how do we get free?” . . .

The result of the hunt: 3 Homo sapiens motoring off in the night with 2 male and 3 female Picoides borealis in an effort to save one of the most resourceful and feisty little avians on the planet.

Clay Ware, forester at the Carolina Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge

Excerpt from "In Search of the Elusive White Wicky"

As we stepped out of forester Clay Ware’s truck, biting yellow flies swarmed us. I sprayed my neck and arms with Deep Woods Off; it made me smelly and sticky. Clay went DEETless. He must have known the flies would disappear when we reached the pocosin . . .

“During prescribed burns, we run fire down into the stream heads,” he said. “You see how thick this is now. If we didn’t burn, the white wicky would get choked out by all the holly and red bay. But if you burn to set the other plants back, white wicky will keep on sprouting. . . . White wicky requires fire . . . It’s what enables this endangered plant to survive” . . .

“Here’s the white wicky--all of this right here,” Clay said, stooping. It was almost an undramatic moment. I had expected, I don’t know, a billboard or something to announce it . . . Then realized I was standing next to the three-foot tall, slender woody stem of one of the more endangered plants on the planet.

Longleaf pines, which may exist in the grass stage "up to 10 years," have survival strategies tested under fire

Excerpt from "After the Fire: Longleafs and New Growth"

“The pine’s new year begins in May, when the terminal bud becomes ‘the candle,’” wrote Aldo Leopold. “Whoever coined that name for the new growth had subtlety in his soul. ‘The candle’ sounds like a platitudinous reference to obvious facts: the new shoot is waxy, upright, brittle. But he who lives with pines knows that candle has a deeper meaning, for at its tip burns the eternal flame that lights a path into the future. May after May my pines follow their candles skyward, each headed straight for the zenith . . .”

To study the adaptation of longleaf-wire grass forests to fire, I went in late May to a woods in the Carolina Sandhills NWR with Forester Clay Ware. This threatened ecosystem needs periodic low-intensity fires to fend off hardwood encroachment. Early in May and “well into the growing season,” said Clay, the NWR crew had staged one of the last burns of the year to preserve a portion of this ecosystem.

Dead, fire-scarred leaves dangled from blackened branches of five- to eight-foot scrub oaks. Last fall, Clay explained, the oaks had stored nutrients in their roots for the next growing season. “This spring, those nutrients were allocated to leaf production. By the time of the burn, the oaks--which we’re trying to get rid of--had already leafed out. When you burn this time of year and kill the scrub oaks’ leaves, you really put the hurt on them. They have limited nutrients stored in the root system to produce new leaves” . . .

The ground we stood on was still black and charred. At first glance, the only color I noticed was a sprinkling of orange longleaf needles. “Needle cast,” said Clay. I was surprised by the length of the needles--up to 18 inches. More heat-singed needles hung from the lower branches of more mature pines, which were often 50 feet tall and 12 inches or more in diameter . . .

I surveyed the black forest floor and for the first time noticed hundreds of grass-stage pines festooning the ground. Although each was charred, each boasted a spray of little green needles. “You can see all of this new growth right above the needle scorch,” he said.

I was impressed and asked if most of the grass-stage longleafs had survived the fire. “Oh yeah,” said Clay. At this stage, their terminal buds are small, hard, and fire-resistant. Even if a fire kills the bud, at the root collar there's a latent bud which steps up, enabling the seedling to survive.

A crew member leans from the open door of a helicopter, dropping incendiary "ping-pong balls" into the burn zone

Excerpt from “Getting the Job Done Safely”

Rules and safety are key to Hayden Bergen, the helicopter pilot. “Some of the pilots that firefighters don’t want to fly with are ‘cowboys’ who try to show off. You can’t show government firefighters something they haven’t seen before. It’s not like you need to impress them. They’re more impressed with getting the job done safely and efficiently and with getting home at night” . . .

I asked how he trained to fly burns. “A lot of your trainers are the people you work with. The people I work with--Mark and Mike and Terri---are awesome. This is my third year, and these guys are by far the best I’ve seen. Mark and Mike have a lot of fire experience. Mark repelled out of a helicopter for years--100, 200 feet up. Those guys are pretty highly regarded” . . .

“Learning to fly a helicopter is not overly hard,” he said. “But this job at the Sandhills--you really have to know how to fly. A pilot who isn’t comfortable won’t be able to do it. When a pilot learns to fly, he has lessons in safety and emergency landings. For example, he follows flight profiles which protect him if his engine fails. On a prescribed burn, though, I may fly about 30 feet above the pines. If something goes wrong, we’re going into the trees. It’s a calculated risk. You do everything you can, but the risk is there. Everyone on the helicopter knows that” . . .

On an ATV, forestry technician Mark Parker patrols the perimeter of a fire break

Excerpt from "Prescription for a Burn"

Compared with the last prescribed burn I had witnessed, Unit 2.2 was trashed with undergrowth--abundant pine needles and leaves, fallen branches, and an encroaching midstory of hardwoods, mostly turkey, red, white, and water oaks. The excess of fuel on the ground made me nervous.

I waited with Don Cockman, Assistant Refuge Manager, by his truck, hoping to get a photo of the burn crew dropping dotted lines of flame with drip torches along the fire break or the edge of the road . . . Don told me that the lines of fire they were laying down would be visual cues for Terri Jenkins, the helicopter’s burn boss. If not for these, the helicopter’s crew “would have a hard time seeing the road” and might accidentally start a fire on the wrong side . . . A moment later over Don's radio I heard Terri Jenkins, the helicopter boss, say something about a dozen blue herons.

“There’s a beaver pond in this unit,” Don explained, “and a big old pond pine snag with a heron rookery.”

The rookery, Mark later told me, was “down in Black Creek bottom in a beaver pond. It’s too wet there, it won’t burn. The herons ate a little smoke, but that’s about it" . . .

Soon the helicopter was shuttling overhead and things heated up. As the aircraft banked fifty feet above the trees, I could see a crew member in its open door working the aerial ignition machine. White “ping-pong balls” fell in lines, fizzed, and burst into small circles of fire seconds after impact. Soon orange flames jumped through the woods, and gray-white smoke wrapped the crowns of the pines. . . .

Friday, June 15, 2007

Forestry Tech Mark Parker, the day's burn boss, briefs the crew on the morning's burn. To Mark's left is helicopter pilot Hayden Bergen

Excerpt from "Definitely an Art”

I followed Mike into the briefing room. Sitting on a table was Hayden Bergen, the helicopter pilot. Mike introduced us. Tall, tan and wearing a green jumpsuit, dark tortoise-shell sunglasses and rock-star hair, the pilot had an accent I couldn’t place. English? Australian? “Ne-ew Zayland,” he said.

On contract from Decatur, Texas, Hayden and the Bell LongRanger helicopter were stationed at the Sandhills through the burn season, from February to May. The next summer, Hayden would be on fire detail at the Moab Desert in Utah, where he would drop 100-gallon buckets of water from his helicopter onto fledgling wildfires so we wouldn’t get to hear about them on the evening news.

Hayden had 2 responsibilities. One was to fly patterns above the burn zone so that the helicopter crew could drop lines of incendiary “ping-pong balls” to start fires. The other was to get the crew back safely.

At an earlier prescribed burn, I’d stood in a fire break and watched the helicopter hover, bank, turn, and shuttle back and forth fifty feet above the trees along the edge of the smoke while a crew member, leaning from the open door of the chopper and manning the aerial ignition machine, dropped balls to seed the flames.

I wondered how the devil Hayden could see the forest through the smoke. . . .

At the Carolina Sandhills NWR, Mike Housh, Mark Parker, and crew fill drip torches with slash fuel in preparation for a prescribed burn

Excerpt from "Staging a Burn"

A morning in late April, 7:00 a.m. I received calls from Scott Lanier, Manager of the Carolina Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge, and Mike Housh, Fire Management Officer. “We’ll try a prescribed burn,” they said, “if we can round up a few extra bodies” . . . A freelance writer, I’d been invited along to watch.

I had a cup of coffee and turned on the Weather Channel. Low of 46. High of 80. Unlimited visibility. Humidity 93. Dew point . . . Sleepy, I wondered what a dew point was. . . .

An hour later, I was at the NWR headquarters in the office of Forestry Tech Mark Parker when Mike Housh entered from the hallway. It was the first time we had met. Strongly built, with a day’s growth of beard and a goatee, dip in his lip and a can in his back pocket, he wore a black t-shirt, green fire-retardant pants, and a ball cap lettered “Carolina Sandhills NWR Fire Region 4 District 2.” In a previous life, Mike had played rugby in Washington State, Texas, and Columbia, SC. I found out later that the helicopter pilot was also a former semipro rugby player. I wondered if there was a Pavlovian connection between the brutal contact sport and fire fighting or just some shared, unconditioned need for the rough-and-tumble.

Planning the burn, Mike and Mark immmediately fell into the shorthand dialog of those who had worked together a long time and knew the terrain. . . .

Saturday, October 07, 2006

Kevin Messenger on the way to release a brown water snake. Kevin is conducting an intensive ten-year study of snakes at the Carolina Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge.

Excerpt from "Snake Cruising"

Kevin Messenger, a graduate of North Carolina State University, had undertaken “a huge project, a ten-year mark-recapture study” of snakes at the NWR. “I want to look at the biodiversity of snakes on the refuge, see which populations are going strong, which are dwindling” . . .

Snake populations at the refuge are not static. The first “herp study” at the refuge, Kevin said, was conducted from 1975 to 1977 by John Garton and Ben Sill of Duke Power Company, about the time of the first prescribed burns at the NWR. That study found no pygmy rattlesnakes. “From 1995 to 1997, Jeff Camper from Francis Marion University did a second study.” By then, pygmies were the most common species on the refuge . . .

“When I began my study, I found 2 or 3 pygmies a night. But if you go 50 miles up into North Carolina, they are endangered. What makes the Carolina Sandhills refuge so special that pygmies are abundant? That’s one of the things I want to figure out. I think that prescribed burning is a huge benefit for pygmies, though I’m not sure why.” He speculated that burns are a boon to fence lizards, a favorite pygmy food. After a burn, the lizards are camouflaged on the charred trunks of trees. “They hide more easily from birds” . . .

Visitors to the Carolina Sandhills NWR, Kevin continued, might not enjoy knowing that 3 of the 4 most common snakes he finds are venomous, though encounters are rare . . .

Carrying his snake stick, a long-shafted handling hook, Kevin strode down the trail to the cottonmouth sluice. I followed. Closely. It was 10 pm. The terrain was dark and tangled, a grassy bank leading to a precipitous path so narrow and overgrown that I had to place each foot directly in front of the other. Large spiders, orb weavers, hung in lacey webs from branches. I had brought a flashlight, an inconsequential thing with two AA batteries that was about as useful as a birthday candle in a haunted castle . . .

I said that I had heard that cottonmoths were aggressive.

"They are to other cottonmouths. But they're not as aggressive as people think. As long as you don't step on one, you're not likely to get bit." . . .

“All of our banded birds--RCWs, wood ducks, doves--have an aluminum Fish and Wildlife Service band,” she explained. On each USFWS band is a number which Laura forwards to a center in Maryland where it’s entered into a nationwide data base.

With deft fingers and special pliers, Laura put three colored plastic bands on one leg of the chick, and one aluminum and one colored band on the other. Then she recorded each chick’s colors and number on a spreadsheet . . .

Because the Carolina Sandhills NWR has a stable red-cockaded population, the refuge donates RCWs to other refuges to aid in species recovery. “We only translocate subadults, and we have to identify the birds we translocate.” She held up a chick. “For example, if this bird is the cluster’s only helper male,” she said, referring to the RCWs’ remarkable family structure, “I wouldn’t translocate him. I’d keep him here on the refuge” . . .

She handed me the chick. It was warm, the talons were well-developed, and the skin was so transparent you could see the internal organs. . . . I tried to imagine what kind of life it would have--whether it would be a helper or breeder; whether it would remain at the refuge or be translocated to Virginia, Arkansas, or elsewhere; and whether its offspring and the Sandhills crew could help keep its kind from going the way of Carolina parakeets.

Friday, July 28, 2006

(In this excerpt, I accompany Laura Housh, field biologist, and Greg Boling, biological science tech, on a field trip to install artificial cavity nests for red-cockaded woodpeckers.)

Why do this at all, I asked Laura Housh, a wildlife biologist at the Carolina Sandhills refuge. Why not let the RCWs make their own cavity nests?

“It can take them a year to make a natural cavity. Because the birds are endangered, if we lose one or two active cavities, it could compromise the family.”

But why should humans care about red-cockaded woodpeckers? Why all this trouble and expense?

“First of all," Laura said, "they are endangered and by law were required to protect them. Also, we’re the reason they are endangered. It’s our responsibility to make sure they can thrive in their natural habitat. I mean, why save an endangered species? Because we can." . . .

I love this time of year,” she added as we walked back to the truck. “The most satisfying thing is to install artificial cavities for recruitment clusters, come back the next year, and find RCWs nesting in them. That’s the best.”

In 1989, Francis Marion National Forest was home to thousands of mature longleaf pines and the world’s second largest population of red-cockaded woodpeckers. “In one night,” said Craig Watson, then the forest’s Wildlife Program Manager, “all of that changed.”

When Hurricane Hugo rolled over the South Carolina forest with gusts of 160 mph, it uprooted cypress and centuries-old live oaks. But longleaf pines, the trees into which RCWs most often dig their nest cavities, were hit the hardest. The morning after Hugo, only 229 of 1765 RCW cavity trees were standing. An estimated 63 percent of that forest’s red-cockaded woodpeckers--already an endangered species--were dead. . . .

Despite the loss of habitat, the RCWs had one thing going for them. At the Savannah River Site, where the population of RCWs had dwindled to 5, biologist David Allen had been at work on a technique to construct and insert artificial RCW cavities into living pines. . . .

Every year, the refuge is scouted for trees with possible red-cockaded woodpecker nests. (These woodpeckers, aka RCWs, are on the endangered species list and are the only woodpeckers to excavate cavity nests in living trees.) The trees are ringed with white paint; and before a prescribed burn, the ground fuel is raked away to a 12 foot diameter to protect the nests.

Thursday, July 27, 2006

Red-cockaded woodpeckers are resourceful birds. For example, to deter their primary predator, rat snakes, RCWs drill resin wells around the entrances to their cavity nests. The wells leak resin, which coats the trunk to form a sticky shield against the snakes.

Because RCWs make their homes in fire-prone areas, though, I had doubts about this tactic. The cavity nests I’d seen were often 20 feet up the trunk. Sometimes higher, but also lower--as low as 6 feet. Coating a cavity tree with highly flammable resin in a fire-prone region didn’t seem like a bright idea.

“Picture the pre-Columbian longleaf pine forest,” explained Ralph Costa, Red-Cockaded Woodpecker Recovery Coordinator for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. “The trees were often 300 to 400 years old--huge, really tall. Because of frequent fires, the understory was essentially grass. De Soto [1540s] and Bartram [1770s] described those forests as prairies with trees. The bigger and taller the trees, the higher the RCW cavity nests and the farther the resin from the ground.” In extant old-growth longleaf forests such as the Wade Tract in Georgia “the cavities are 70, 80 feet up because they can be.” Before the old longleaf forests were cut, “it didn’t matter that there was sap on trees. The flashy fuel, the low intensity fires, the shorter flame heights--these probably weren’t an issue to the red-cockaded.”

Because tracts of longleaf habitat--like that of the Carolina Sandhills Refuge--are protected now, “someday the trees will be taller and the cavities higher than they are today. But until our pines get bigger, our fuels get lower, and our cavity trees increase in number,” he added, “the woodpeckers need our help. . . .

“RCWs are also an indicator species. If you have red-cockadeds, it’s a good indication that you have a healthy Southern pine forest. Some people argue that we’re investing all this time and these resources in single-species management. With RCWs, it’s easy to shoot holes in that argument. By preserving 200-acre patches of longleaf forest for the woodpeckers, we’re taking care of everything else that’s living out there.”

Saturday, July 08, 2006

Much of the burning is done with a “ping-pong ball machine,” a curious rectangular steel contraption which drops incendiary balls from a helicopter into the burn zone. Officially known as the Primo Mark III Aerial Ignition Machine, the device is designed not only for starting burns but for fighting wildfires. In the Sandhills, “there’s good leaf litter for the balls to ignite in," said Fire Management Officer Terri Jenkins.

A weekday in early April, 7:30 a.m. I received a call from refuge manager Scott Lanier. Conditions looked good for a prescribed burn at the Carolina Sandhills NWR, and he invited me along. . . .

An hour later, I was with Scott at the refuge headquarters in the cab of a white 4x4 US Fish and Wildlife Service truck, looking at a xeroxed map of Carolina Sandhills NWR Compartment 17. . . .

“Today is a growing season burn,” he explained, “as opposed to a dormant, winter burn. Research shows that fire often occurs in the growing season. We try to mimic that. It helps curtail the oaks, which are sucking up nutrients from the soil and budding out. Our goal is not to eradicate the oaks, but to control them. Oaks are part of this habitat and provide mast--acorns--for animals.

“If we burn at this time, the fire will kill a lot of the oaks. We haven’t pushed the envelope, though, and burned in summer. You can really torch your pines if the conditions--moisture, fuel, and temperature--aren’t perfect.” . . .

The burn crew consisted of 6 men and 2 women--firefighters not only from the Carolina Sandhills NWR but from as far away as Savannah. Of these 8, 3 would be in the helicopter.

I shook hands with Terri Jenkins, a Fire Management Officer from the Savannah Coastal Refuges Complex and the helicopter’s burn boss. . . . In addition to herself and the pilot, a third crew member ran the “ping-pong ball machine,” a curious rectangular steel contraption bolted to the side opening of the helicopter and designed not only for starting burns but for fighting wildfires. Officially, the ping-pong ball machine is known as the Premo Mark III Aerial Ignition Machine. . . .

“The Sandhills are particularly adapted to the use of this system,” Terri said. “There’s good leaf litter for the balls to ignite in. The balls are used not only for prescribed burns,” she added, “but also for fire suppression.” A wildfire can be suppressed by starting a burn on a forest floor to consume the fuel before the wildfire can reach it. . . .

Later, back at the refuge office, I had an opportunity to talk with Patricia McCoy, the NWR’s accountant, administrative assistant, and dispatcher. Patricia is stationed in the headquarters, and her role in a burn is to monitor weather reports, obtain state approval to burn, coordinate communication between the ground and helicopter crews, and deal with a mountain of paper work. . . .

Excerpt 3: Laying Down the Line

We drove on down a maze of dirt roads deeper into the forest. Ahead, smoke was boiling out from the woods. A fire engine sat at a crossroads. The ground crew, highly visible in their yellow fire-retardant Nomex shirts, had started a prescribed burn at Unit 9.3. We parked near a scorched swath of land which paralleled the road bed and stepped out of the truck.

Striding fast along the fire break--in this case, a dirt road--the crew was creating a “black line” about 20 yards wide by pouring fire onto the ground cover from drip torches, canisters of “slash fuel,” a diesel and gas mixture in a 3:1 ratio. When tilted, the torches dripped fire from metal spouts tipped with wicks. . . .

Excerpt 4: The Burn

I had been to the refuge often, hiking, fishing, hunting, and biking; but I’d never seen it like this. It was a Dantesque scene of an inferno. The ground was smoldering black. Three-foot flames licked at the tree trunks. The yellow-shirted, smoke-smudged crew tramped through the firebreak, setting fire to any patch of wiregrass that hadn’t yet caught. A yellow fire engine, red lights flashing, stood sentinel on the dirt road.

I looked on from the firebreak with Scott and Mark Parker, the ground burn boss, and watched the thick gray smoke roiling into the sky and wondered how the devil the helicopter crew could see to drop its pattern of fireballs into the burn zone. . . .

I asked if any animals take a hit in the burns. Mark paused. “There’s always a possibility of killing a few. But on a refuge that’s 45,000 acres, the benefit of new growth outweighs the small amount of loss.” The argument is, it’s better for wildlife to suffer small, periodic burns than one catastrophic wildfire which kills an entire forest community. . . .

The Carolina Sandhills are ancient. They are small hills, often just subtle risings and fallings in the land. It’s easy to imagine when you drive down a dirt road here or hike through the forest that the Sandhills are the time-wasted dunes or marooned shore of an unknown Paleozoic sea . . . To an untrained eye, the pine forests of the Carolina Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge look, well, monotonous. . . . But the refuge harbors a remnant of one of the rarest ecosystems on Earth--a longleaf pine forest, a forest home to over 720 plant species . . . It is good to know that you don’t have to trek to Alaska or the Amazon to find the wild or rare. Sadly, you don’t have to go far to find the endangered, either. At the NWR are plant and animal species hanging onto life with slender roots and talons. And one thing that these species and the forest share is the need for fire. To find out more about longleaf pine forests and fire, I talked with Scott Lanier, Manager of the Carolina Sandhills NWR. Scott’s headquarters is a red brick building surrounded by 45,000 acres of tall pines, wiregrass, pocosins, ponds and purple-flowering green lupine . . . “One reason we have wildfires is because fire has been suppressed for so long that when a forest finally burns, it’s catastrophic,” Scott explained. “Had prescribed burns been introduced periodically, we might not have experienced those wildfires.” The Sandhills, he said, has a history of fires, both natural and manmade. “Native Americans burned off fields to grow crops and hunt game. Lightning also caused areas to burn occasionally. Our area suffered some real smokin’ wildfires in the early 1940s, but as the US Fish and Wildlife Service began prescribed burning, catastrophic wildfires decreased." . . .

Back at home, I dusted off a copy of William Bartram’s “Travels” and thumbed to a passage where the author, venturing from Savannah to Augusta in the 1780s, finds himself “on the entrance of a vast plain, generally level, which extends west sixty or seventy miles . . . This plain is mostly a forest of great long-leaved pine (P. palustris Linn.) the earth covered with grass, interspersed with an infinite variety of herbaceous plants . . .” Nearly a hundred million acres of original forest lost to America, and never having seen a stand of virgin longleaf, I was incapable of imagining what we had lost. I promised myself that I would visit an old growth longleaf forest before the year was out.

The above photo tells a lot. A burn has just swept through. The ground is smoking, and to the right, a snag still burns. A big longleaf pine, bark singed but otherwise unscathed, dominates the scene. The needles of the younger pines are still green; the low flames never reached their crowns. Several young oaks which would grow into a midstory and threaten the longleaf habitat have taken a hit and may die. But nearby, taller hardwoods have survived, enough to provide mast for raccoons and deer. Though the understory is gone, the loss is temporary: in a few weeks, after a rain, things will green up. These low-intensity burns are a boon to the forest community, preserving the habitat and promoting new growth and food sources for the animals.

Thanks for the comment. Sorry it’s taken some days to get back to you. Allison and I have been camping and kayaking on Lake Jocassee, SC. Stayed at the primitive Double Springs campground. Paddled to Thompson Creek Falls, sunned on the rocks, swam the cool lake water. Saw lots of butterflies, including a zebra swallowtail (my first sighting of one). And, oddly, saw ten or more snakes--which is strange because though I frequently paddle blackwater swamps which are rumored to be rife with reptiles, I rarely see snakes. The snakes we saw at Jocassee were beautiful--one Eastern king snake and possibly a timber rattler (black phase) in a rocky ledge at a stream (we didn’t get close enough to verify him), and as many as nine water snakes, probably Midland, but again, I’m not sure. Simple questions--”Where do you see yourself in this landscape of fire? Does the book explore the complex longleaf ecosystem or is it more of a personal journey?”--are hard to answer. Dr. John Elder, a teacher and friend from Middlebury College, asked me similar questions, so you’re in great company. By nature I’m not introspective, and I’m spending some time struggling to answer and draft a reply--another reason for the late response. As a writer, I’m not only in a vast historical landscape but in a bookscape of other nature writers; and if I have any sense I’m humbled by both. If I may point to one writer and say, “That’s what I aspire to,” it would be A. R. Ammons. In Ammons' poetry, the speaker is often walking in a huge, ever-changing landscape, asking questions and getting answers from elemental forces such as the wind. Ammons doesn’t write with a megaphone or an agenda. He’s inquiring and humorous--traits which come from a humility which comes from understanding one’s place in the universe. I’m not a natural scientist. My method is to field-trip with those who are, to watch and ask questions and faithfully record what I see and hear. My motive for writing is like Ammons’ in “Identity,” a poem about spider webs:

it is wonderful how things work: I will tell you about it because

it is interesting

It’s beyond me to mount a campaign to save longleaf forests, though, like rain forests and arctic ice, they need to be saved. The banner of ecological salvation is borne by more knowledgeable and authoritative people, by past environmentalists like Muir and Leopold, by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Longleaf Alliance, The Nature Conservancy, the SC Prescribed Fire Council and others, and by the score of people who work and talk in these pages. I guess the answer to both your questions, then, is “Yes.” I’m on a personal journey through a complex ecosystem--but I hope my focus is always on the landscape. If my book helps promote longleaf habitat, that’s great. But like Edward Abbey, I want to spend half my time in the wild just having fun.

About Me

Den Latham grew up in Ohio and East Tennessee. He attended the University of Toledo, earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Tennessee, attended Clemson University and Oxford University, and received a master’s from Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English. He taught high school in Salem, South Carolina, and at the SC Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics. His travels include Mexico, Europe, North Africa, England, Scotland, Ireland, and Central America.
Den lives with his wife Allison in Hartsville, South Carolina. He has two sons and is a three-time member of the US East Surf Kayak Team. His articles have appeared in local papers, Pee Dee Magazine, Sandlapper Magazine, the Aroostook Review, and South Carolina Wildlife magazine. “Painting the Landscape with Fire” is his second book. You may contact Den at denallison@bellsouth.net